✸ I love these vibrant illustrations by A. Alexeieff for Russian Fairy Tales, from 1945
This bit from Eudora makes me want to track down a copy of my own:“These Russian tales are rambunctious, full-blooded and temperamental. They are tense with action,
magical and human, and move in a kind of cyclone of speed. These tales are gorgeous.”
– Eudora Welty

✸ Lori Field’s Forest Stories
I also really love these encaustic paintings. Wonderful, dreamy colors.“Lori Field’s paintings depict a world where animals and humans live together in enchanted forests
filled with two headed skeleton kittens, Tiger goose head cows, and baby ram angels.”

“Virvon, varvon/tuoreeks, terveeks, tulevaks vuodeks/sulle vitsa/ mulle palkka”
✸ I LOVE this holiday: Virvon, varvon…
“I will wish, whisk and whack/ you health and happiness/
for this new season/ for you the branch/ for me the prize.”

✸ The wonderful Slavic folktale styled graphic work of Tin Can Forest is making me very happy.
“The deep, dark forest of our collective unconscious has never seemed more beautiful and mysterious
than in the images of Tin Can Forest. The Toronto-based team of artists Pat Shewchuk and Marek Colek
spin tales where barter-happy demons and animal spirits, drawn from Slavic folklore, walk in step with
witches and villagers. We caught up with Tin Can Forest to ask them about their work and new book‘Baba Yaga and the Wolf’ from Koyama Press.”

✸ The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga“The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga examines man’s interaction with the mythic woodlands of Eastern Europe,
detailing the bloody history and complex psychologies that transformed the forest from a conceptually sinister space into
a realm of precious security. Mushroom hunting provides a passageway into the history of the region and helps reveal the
roles that woodlands play in the psychology and sociology of fear, imagination, and survival.

For generations of Slavic peoples, the dark, dense woods were construed as foreboding and menacing, ruled by the witch
Baba Yaga. In the minds of many, Baba Yaga was believed to be a very real entity – to roam within her reach meant almost
certain death. How then did the people of Eastern Europe – with their culturally ingrained fear of the forest and the witch within –
come to rely so heavily on Baba Yaga’s wilderness during times of need?

Baba Yaga was vanquished by necessity when refugees of war and social unrest fled to her woods for shelter, nourishment, and
sanctuary. Drawing on fairy tales, folklore, and personal recollections, The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga examines how
the collective, social memory of Eastern Europe both shaped and shapes local relationships with the forest.”This looks really wonderful. Watch the promo video!

My pals Dark Dark Dark were just here in Austin, and made me fall in love with them all over again.
This is one of my favorite songs of theirs. I sing it all day long, and so will you, I hope.

Tell me what you celebrate
It isn’t hard to do…
Do you love me?
Do you love that paint?
Exposing the brick
They’re crumbling a bit
Do you love the bees
Fly over our heads
Race into the woods
Make honey so sweet

Do you love me
Do you love the breeze
When you stand on the deck
Of a boat on the sea
Or when it comes through
An open window
Of a high ceiling room
On the eleventh floor

Do you love stories
Of that stream you found
You followed the path
Ferns under your feet
The trees they parted
And you stumbled upon
The coolest stream
Your skin has known…

And tell me what you celebrate
It isn’t hard to do
Do you love me
A walk on the street
Oh lavender!
The scent fills the air
Oh remember
The hand sewn quilt
We laid on it there
We laid on it there…

✸ My darling dearest Dana Sherwood has a new project called All My Dresses“Archiving twenty years of collecting vintage dresses, some have been destroyed,
some have been “borrowed”, none have been intentionally discarded.”

✸ Look at Me, I’m Crying
A beautiful piece on crying in public in New York City. I can relate, having found myself doing just that, far too often,
on my last excursion up there. Maybe it was the insidious combination of mercury retrograde and vicious sinus infection
that made me more susceptible than usual to uncontrollably weeping on streetcorners, park benches, Duane Reade,
the backs of various taxis. It was kind of ridiculous. I remember being sandwiched on a bench between a henna-haired
bag lady and a lanky teenage boy reading an old science fiction paperback. They just shared the space with me,
and let me cry – oblivious or unbothered, but it was oddly peaceable. The Nigerian cab driver was much more
disturbed, begging me to stop my weeping, and promising to somehow help me figure out how to get from Prospect
Park South to Williamsburg in fifteen minutes. Yeah, that didn’t end up working out, but he was very nice to me.“If you live in New York, you’re bound to end up crying in public eventually; there just aren’t enough private places.
Just the other day I saw someone doing it on West 12th Street. A tall woman in a beret, with a curtain of reddish hair,
she had tears streaming down her cheeks. She wasn’t on the phone, wasn’t accompanied by a man, or a mom or even
a dog. She wasn’t beautiful, the way a lot of people in New York are, but I couldn’t look away.”

✸ Ruslana Korshunova – The Lost Girl
Why did a supermodel at the top of her game—hauntingly beautiful and only 20—kill herself in 2008?
A filmmaker describes his three-year quest for clues, and answers.

✸ The Lost Boys“In December 1970 two teenagers disappeared from the Heights neighborhood, in Houston.
Then another and another and another. As the number of missing kids grew, no one realized
that the most prolific serial killer the country had ever seen—along with his teenage accomplices—
was living comfortably among them. Or that the mystery of what happened to so many of his
victims would haunt the city to this day.”

✸ The exceptional mourning of twins
From Mind Hacks:“I’ve just found an amazing article that looks at how the death of twins is mourned in cultures around the world.
The journal Twin Research and Human Genetics is usually dedicated to the science of twin studies –
a key method for understanding the role of genetics and the environment on the development of human traits.
In 2002 they had a special issue that took a very different look at the subject – examining grief and mourning related to twins.
One of the articles is a stunning look at the anthropology of twin death, exploring the diverse and intriguing beliefs and practices concerning twin death.”

✸ the greening life from Moonshine Junkyard
These same thoughts have been buzzing around my brain, but I didn’t have a word to hold them close – until now: viriditas!“the light green heart of the living fullness of nature.”
Thanks for this, Tam.

Dearest Suzanne,
Thank you darling! I had found Jeremy’s work on your site not all that long ago, and fell deeply in love his girls, but when I went back to hunt them down, I couldn’t find them anywhere, alas! Thank you for reminding me, sugar…xoxo

You’re most welcome. I adore his girls too – I’m particularly fond of his love for albinism. His blog is also really worth following and even though he posts rather infrequently, he really gives you an insight into his process, as seen here: